ABC News producer who became a transgender ‘woman’ decides he is a man again

NEW YORK, August 6, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – It's a woman's prerogative to change her mind, but "Dawn" Ennis is changing much more.

In May, ABC News producer and editor Don Ennis said that he was really "Dawn Stacey Ennis," a woman trapped inside his male body. Three months later, he has decided he is Don again and wants his buddies in the newsroom to forget his coming to work in heels.

“I’m asking all of you who accepted me as a transgender to now understand: I was misdiagnosed," he said in an e-mail to friends last Friday. He said he would be a man “again, now and forever. And it appears I’m not transgender after all.”

The note sounded much different than his announcement in May that he had embraced his inner female, “Dawn Stacey Ennis.” The Facebook post – which also said he was ending his 17-year marriage to wife Wendy and moving out of the home they shared with their three children – said his first sex-change was irrevocable.

"This is not a game of dress-up, or make-believe,” he said at the time. “It is my affirmation of who I now am and what I must do to be happy."

Ennis said his mother gave him hormone treatments so he could continue his career as a child commercial actor, and he had looked more like a woman than a man for some time. Except for his balding pate.

ABC News President Ben Sherwood wrote Don a note supporting his change, and his colleagues brought him flowers.

He began to wear female clothing to work and take hormone treatments, as well as scout for a book deal to describe his change. “I’m looking forward to telling my story when I’m ready,” he said.

Others in the homosexual lobby were eager to tell his story as well. When Don became Dawn in May, GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) said “there is some shock value in this story, but it has nothing to do with Ennis or [his] gender identity; it has to do with the New York Post's respectful coverage of [his] transition and the support [he] received.”

The homosexual group said his high-visibility decision to change sex, and the New York tabloid's gracious coverage, respected its view that gender is not biologically determined and could be changed.

But a two-day bout of "global transient amnesia" made Ennis wake up thinking it was 1999 – and he was a man again. While he says the amnesia left him, the firm conviction that he is a man did not.

But not everything had changed, although he was now using the men's room again. "I promise to remain a strong straight ally, a supporter of diversity and an advocate for equal rights and other LGBT issues including same-sex marriage," he said.

GLAAD did not immediately have a response to Ennis' announcement that he decided to transition back to being a man.